Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (Владимир Иванович Вернадский) (March 12 1863 – January 6 1945) was a Russian-Ukrainian mineralogist and geochemist whose ideas of noosphere were an important contribution to the Russian cosmism. He was a founding father of several new disciplines, including geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and radiogeology.

Vernadsky graduated from the St Petersburg University in 1885. He first popularized the concept of the noosphere and deepened the idea biosphere to the meaning largely recognized by today's scientific community. The word biosphere was invented by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, whom Vernadsky had met in 1911. Vernadsky is considered one of the precursors of ecology.

In Vernadsky's theory of how the Earth develops, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. In this theory, the principles of both life and cognition are the essential features of the earth's evolution, and must have been implicit in the earth all along. This is in contrast to

Vernadsky was the founder and the first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev, Ukraine (1918) and worked closely with the Tavrida University in Crimea. During the Russian Civil War, he hosted the gatherings of the young intellectuals who later founded the emigre Eurasianist movement . One of the main avenues in Moscow is named after him.

Verandsky's son George Vernadsky (1887-1973) emigrated to the United States where he published numerous books on medieval Russian history as well as medieval Ukrainian history and modern Russian history.

Works (selected)

• Geochemistry, published in Russian 1924
• The Biosphere, published in Russian 1926 (English translation 1998)
• Dnevniki 1917-1921: oktyabr 1917-yanvar 1920 (Diaries 1917-1921), Kiev, Naukova dumka, 1994

See also

• Gaia theory (science)

Vladimir VERNADSKIJ Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky Вернадский, Владимир Иванович Вернадський Володимир Іванович